The political dissensions of the seventeenth century had completely consumed the superfluous energy of the English nation and while the citizens of other countries continued to kill each other for the sake of the Trinity and prenatal damnation, religious persecution in Great Britain came to an end. Now and then a too presumptuous critic of the established church, like Daniel Defoe, might come into unpleasant contact with the law, but the author of “Robinson Crusoe” was pilloried because he was a humorist rather than an amateur theologian and because the Anglo-Saxon race, since time immemorial, has felt an inborn suspicion of irony. Had Defoe written a serious defense of tolerance, he would have escaped with a reprimand. When he turned his attack upon the tyranny of the church into a semi-humorous pamphlet entitled “The Shortest Way with Dissenters,” he showed that he was a vulgar person without a decent sense of the proprieties and one who deserved no better than the companionship of the pickpockets of Newgate Prison. Even then Defoe was fortunate that he had never extended his travels beyond the confines of the British Isles. For intolerance having been driven from the mother country had found a most welcome refuge in certain of the colonies on the other side of the ocean. And this was due not so much to the character of the people who had moved into these recently discovered regions as to the fact that the new world offered infinitely greater economic advantages than the old one. In England itself, a small island so densely populated that it offered standing room only to the majority of her people, all business would soon have come to an end if the people had not been willing to practice the ancient and honorable rule of “give and take.” But in America, a country of unknown extent and unbelievable riches, a continent inhabited by a mere handful of farmers and workmen, no such compromise was necessary. And so it happened that a small communist settlement on the shores of Massachusetts Bay could develop into such a stronghold of self-righteous orthodoxy that the like of it had not been seen since the happy days when Calvin exercised the functions of Chief of Police and Lord High Executioner in western Switzerland. The credit for the first permanent settlement in the chilly regions of the Charles River usually goes to a small group of people who are referred to as the Pilgrim Fathers. A Pilgrim, in the usual sense of the word, is one who “journeys to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion.” The passengers of the _Mayflower_ were not pilgrims in that sense of the word. They were English bricklayers and tailors and cord-wainers and blacksmiths and wheelwrights who had left their country to escape certain of those hated “poperies” which continued to cling to the worship in most of the churches around them.